The present invention relates to a print control method, apparatus, and medium and, more particularly, to a print control method, apparatus, and medium for storing a computer program in a system including an information processing apparatus such as a personal computer or the like, and a printer.
Upon printing data such as text data, image data, or the like edited by an application program for editing text or image data, a print preview function that presents an image to be printed on the screen in a print layout to the user before the image is actually printed on a paper sheet is known. The print preview function is included in the application program.
Software which has a xe2x80x9cbundle printxe2x80x9d function of holding document data which are instructed to be printed by an application as print jobs in units of document data without being output to a printer, and bundling and sending these jobs as one print job to the printer is known.
In xe2x80x9cbundle printxe2x80x9d, document data created by an application is spooled as an EMF file without being output to a graphic engine as a rendering means of an operating system (OS), and when the user instructs to print later, all spooled data are output to the graphic engine and are passed to a printer driver.
Since such bundle print function spools data generated by the application, the preview function of the application cannot be used, and the user cannot check how the bundled print jobs are actually going to be printed.
In the conventional bundle print function, since the printer driver simultaneously generates print data for all designated print jobs in accordance with the setups of the printer driver when the user instructs to print, spooled jobs which are output from the application cannot have different print setups.
To combat this problem, a mechanism for spooling jobs on the basis of data output from the graphic engine as the rendering means of the OS to provide information such as a page layout or the like set by the printer driver in units of jobs may be used. When jobs are spooled using this mechanism, since they have individual print setups, jobs with different page layouts can be combined. Also, previews of jobs spooled by this mechanism may be displayed.
However, when a plurality of spooled jobs are combined into a single combined job, and a preview of the combined job is displayed, the relationship among source jobs and their pages is not easy to recognize. For this reason, when the user wants to manipulate pages or jobs while their previews are displayed, he or she cannot recognize the correspondence between jobs and pages, thus disturbing smooth operations.
The present invention has been made in consideration of the above prior art, and has as its object to provide a print control method and apparatus, which display jobs to be displayed as preview images, and pages displayed as preview images while clarifying their correspondence.
In order to achieve the above object, the present invention comprises the following arrangement. That is, a print control apparatus comprises:
a previewer for displaying print jobs stored in a spooler and preview images of pages corresponding to the print jobs as image objects; and
re-display means for identifiably re-displaying a correspondence between a designated object and a corresponding object when one of the image objets displayed in the preview display step is designated.
Preferably, the re-display means identifiably displays a correspondence between a designated print job and a page which belongs to the print job when the designated image object is a print job, and identifiably displays a correspondence between a selected page and a print job to which the page belongs when the designated object is a page preview image.
Preferably, the apparatus further comprises a spooler for storing print data.
Preferably, the apparatus further comprises a despooler for making a printing apparatus print the print data in an order of the preview display when a bookbinding print mode is designated.
Alternatively, according to another aspect of the present invention, there is provided a computer readable storage medium which stores a computer program for making a computer implement the method.
Alternatively, according to still another aspect of the present invention, there is provided a print control method implemented by the apparatus.